How effective must a Covid-19 vaccine be to stop the pandemic in its tracks?

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The world is pinning its hopes on a Covid-19 vaccine, but that vaccine’s effectiveness will determine whether life can really return to normal, writes researcher Bruce Y Lee

Using that model, we were able to introduce the Covid-19 virus into this virtual population in different ways and have it spread from person to person in various pandemic scenarios. Each simulated person who gets infected has probabilities of being hospitalised, placed on a ventilator or dying based on the severity of the problems just as in the real world.

The results show how vaccines with different levels of efficacy would affect the pandemic and can be used to estimate the impact on things such as number of people who get infected, health outcomes and costs. In this case, we assumed that only one vaccination would be required.Typically, in an epidemic or pandemic, as more people are exposed to the virus, the number of new infections per day steadily increases until it reaches a peak and begins to drop.

If only 75% of the population gets vaccinated, the vaccine efficacy would have to be around 70%. If only 60% of people get vaccinated, the threshold goes even higher, to around 80%. It’s all about making sure the virus can’t find more people to infect.infects 2.5 other people on average. If the virus is more contagious, the vaccine has to be more efficient.

 

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